Jack Dumbacher with the owl collection at the California Academy of Sciences.Credit: 2017 California Academy of Sciences
Wildlife species are being exposed to high levels of rat poison in northwest California, with illegal marijuana farms the most likely source point, according to a study led by the University of California, Davis, with the California Academy of Sciences.
The study, released Jan. 11 in the journal Avian Conservation and Ecology, showed that seven of the 10 Northern spotted owls collected tested positive for rat poison, while 40 percent of 84 barred owls collected also tested positive for the poison.
The study is the first published account of anticoagulant rodenticide in Northern spotted owls, which are listed as a threatened species under federal and state Endangered Species acts.
Mourad W. Gabriel, Lowell V. Diller, John P. Dumbacher, Greta M. Wengert, John M. Higley, Robert H. Poppenga, Shannon Mendia. Exposure to rodenticides in Northern Spotted and Barred Owls on remote forest lands in northwestern California: evidence of food web contamination. Avian Conservation and Ecology, 2018; 13 (1) DOI: 10.5751/ACE-01134-130102
Australia is no stranger to fire: The hardy landscape is adapted to blazes, enduring many thanks to humans and lightning. But Australia’s Aboriginal peoples have long identified a third cause: birds.
In interviews, observations, and ceremonies dating back more than a century, the indigenous peoples of Australia’s Northern Territory maintain that a collective group of birds they call “firehawks” can control fire by carrying burning sticks to new locations in their beaks or talons.
The anecdotes, compiled in a recent study published in the Journal of Ethnobiology, may lead some to rethink how fires spread through tropical savannas like those in northern Australia.
“We’re not discovering anything,” cautions co-author Mark Bonta, a National Geographic grantee and geographer at Penn State University. “Most of the data that we’ve worked with is collaborative with Aboriginal peoples… They’ve known this for probably 40,000 years or more.”
The black kite (pictured, an animal at Madagascar’s Tsimbazaza Zoo) is one of the birds thought to spread fire in Australia. PHOTOGRAPH BY JOEL SARTORE, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC PHOTO ARK
natgeo Photograph by @thomaspeschakGalapagos Marine Iguanas live on the edge and the difference between life and death is a few degrees of temperature. The world’s only ocean going lizards graze on cold water seaweeds. Increases in sea temperature due to climate change have detrimental effects on marine iguana populations. No seaweed=No iguanas. If temperatures continue to warm these Galapagos icons could become the first to disappear. The world’s leading scientists have just met at @darwinfound in the Galapagos to discuss how to safeguard and protect the island’s unique fauna and flora from climate change. To find out more follow @darwinfound#climatechangegalapagos
The barreleye fish The barreleye (Macropinna microstoma) has extremely light-sensitive eyes that can rotate within a transparent, fluid-filled shield on its head.
Heart attacks and strokes are the crises we notice, but they result from a slow process of atherosclerosis, the hardening and clogging of the arteries with fatty substances called lipids. Immune cells stick to the walls of blood vessels, scavenge lipids, and multiply. The blood vessel walls inflame and thicken as the smooth muscle cells lining them change, swelling and dividing to create plaques, clogs, and warty growths called atheromas.
For a very long time, doctors and researchers assumed that the lipids came from eating fatty, cholesterol-rich food. But the research hasn’t borne this out; some people who eat large amounts of the foods we thought were the sources of the fat, such as eggs, butter, fatty fish, and meat, don’t necessarily develop heart disease.
UConn researchers believe they may have solved part of the puzzle. Using careful chemical analysis of atheromas collected from patients by a colleague at Hartford Hospital, they found lipids with a chemical signature unlike those from animals at all. Instead, these strange lipids come from a specific family of bacteria.
“I always call them greasy bugs because they make so much lipid. They are constantly shedding tiny blebs of lipids. Looks like bunches of grapes,” on a bacterial scale, says Frank Nichols, a UConn Health periodontist who studies the link between gum disease and atherosclerosis. The bacteria, called Bacteroidetes, make distinctive fats. The molecules have unusual fatty acids with branched chains and odd numbers of carbons (mammals typically don’t make either branched chain fatty acids or fatty acids with odd numbers of carbons).
Reza Nemati et al, Deposition and hydrolysis of serine dipeptide lipids of Bacteroidetes bacteria in human arteries: relationship to atherosclerosis, Journal of Lipid Research (2017). DOI: 10.1194/jlr.M077792
Scientists have discovered some of the best preserved specimens of the world’s first trees in a remote region of China. At up to 12 meters tall, these spindly species were topped by a clump of erect branches vaguely resembling modern palm trees and lived a whopping 393 million to 372 million years ago. But the biggest surprise is how they got so big in the first place.
Today’s trees grow through a relatively simple mechanism. The trunk is a single cylindrical shaft made up of hundreds of woody strands called xylem, which conduct water from the roots to the branches and leaves. New xylem grow in rings at the periphery of the trunk just behind the bark, adding girth so the tree can get taller.
This is not how ancient trees known as cladoxylopsids grew, however. Two specimens discovered in a desert in China’s northwestern Xinjiang province in 2012 were remarkably well preserved. That’s because they underwent a process in which silica—likely emitted by a nearby volcano—saturated the tree and took on the shape of the wood’s internal structure as it decayed, preserving its 3D cellular structure.
The fossils reveal that, unlike modern trees with a single shaft, cladoxylopsids had multiple xylem columns spaced around the perimeter of a hollow trunk. A network of crisscrossing strands connected the vertical xylem—much like a chain-link fence spreads from pole to pole—and soft tissue filled the spaces between all these strands. New growth formed in rings around each of the xylem columns while an increasing volume of soft tissue forced the strands to spread out.
All of this expanded the girth of the trunk, allowing for a taller tree. But it also split apart the tree’s xylem skeleton, which required the tree to continually repair itself, the team reports today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The weight of the tree squeezed tissue at the base of the trunk outward.
Project by
Chaim Gingold
and
Luke Iannini
is an open-source and cheap interactive system involving tabletob projection:
La Tabla is a magical table—put things on it and they come to life. Make
music and animations. Play games. Design your own pinball tables. Use
your body, your friends, paper, drawings, game pieces—whatever strikes
your fancy.
…
La Tabla introduces a groundbreaking way to interact with computers.
Rather than using a finger to click on a mouse or poke at a screen, you
reach into the simulation world with two hands, bringing the full force
of your hominid dexterity and playfulness to the table. Because you can
put whatever you like—coins, stones, books, drawings, yourself—into the
simulation world, play is surprisingly improvisational and open-ended.
Playing with others doesn’t require sharing a mouse, keyboard, or
network connection. Everyone sees and touches the same thing, which is
such a profound way to interact that we take it for granted during our
everyday, non-computerized, life.
Japanese programmer has unveiled proof-of-concept effects for Augmented Reality game made with ARKit including visual filters and Predator-like optical camouflage:
I really like parametric tools like this, where the history and rules of constructing something is interactively adjustable.
This particular one was developed as a side effect of Engare, a game by Mahdi Bahrami about motion and geometry.
The history of Islamic art has a lot of fascinating context I won’t get in to here, but its use of geometric patterns and rules overlaps with my interest in procedural art. I’m glad that Mahdi has found a way to bring some of that to the interactive world.
